Research On Motivations Of User-Generated Playlists In Online Music Streaming

The birth of online music streaming replaces the traditional way of music content distribution and music storage method.It changed the revenue model of music industry,also deeply changed user behavior at the same time.With the development of information technology and mobile internet,and with people’s demand of music,users now can access massive music resource on music streaming platforms with devices which are connected to the internet.According to the statistics,people spend the longest time on listening to the music from their personal music playlists,in addition with the introduction of social feature functions,listening to music is not a personal experience anymore.In fact,an online music streaming platform is an online music community.Users of music streaming services gather together because of their interests,demands,and even benefits of music.Users can connect with each other via the social functions provided from platforms.Creating or modifying music playlists is one of the performances of user-generated content.However,whether the online music streaming continue to prosper and develop depends on whether users keep contributing contents to the online music communities.This paper studies the content contribution behavior of user-generated playlists in online music streaming,exploring the influential factors of driving user contribute content to online music communities,to encourage users to continue participating related activities of online communities and to promote users to keep contributing content further.This study based on the novel theoretical perspective of Social Value Orientation,according to the social preference and corresponding choices and behaviors of individuals when facing resources distribution,identifying three value orientation motivations,i.e.,the effects of individual orientation motivation,cooperative orientation motivation,and competitive orientation motivation on user content contribution,considering the direct effect of social influence to content contribution and the moderating effect of social influence to orientation motivations at the same time,forming the theoretical model and research hypotheses of this study.The study scraped user behavior data that are related to playlists and social from an online music streaming platform,forming the panel data with users as the individual dimension and quarters as the time dimension,building econometrics models of fixed-effect negative binomial regression,verifying the hypotheses that we proposed.Our research results show that,individual orientation motivation,cooperative orientation motivation,competitive orientation motivation and social influence have positive effect on user generating playlists content,social influence has positive moderating effect on competitive orientation motivation but has negative moderating effect on cooperative orientation motivation.This research uses a novel theoretical perspective,uncovering motivations behind users generating playlist content on music streaming platforms,further deepening the understanding of researchers about the motivations and antecedents of user-generated content in online communities,enriching literature of related research area.Meanwhile,results of this study give practical insights to music streaming practitioners about how to guide users actively contribute playlist content in the future.